A frequent challenge for managers of building automation systems is the management of lists of raw data provided from various control systems. Such data is most often presented in one or more tables, possibly with filtering methods presented as options to organize the raw data. As such, a building administrator may be tasked with skimming through upwards of tens or hundreds of thousands of event messages and/or alarms in an effort to identify which control systems require attention. The use of filters predominates as the typical method for sorting event messages and alarms. However, the use of generic filters has extremely poor usability. Although manual filters can be used to filter raw data, their use is cumbersome and often difficult to implement correctly.